SwingingTheLamp

The trouble, I think, is that even Reddit wasn’t Reddit (as we think of it now) for years and years. Recall that when it started, there were no subreddits, it was all one feed. The niche subreddits branched off of more general ones after participation grew and critical mass developed, the subreddit topics driven by what users were talking about.

It doesn’t work the other way around. You can create a community to house a topic that people want to talk about; you can’t make people interested in a topic just by creating a community. I think we’ve suffered by premature fissioning into a thousand niche communities, each with 1 or 2 people talking to themselves.

Well, not quite. The corporation is a distinct legal entity, and is served a summons per se. For practical purposes of actually delivering the papers to a person, the corporation must have a designated representative. This may be anybody, and there are businesses that specialize in serving as the designated representative for perhaps hundreds of corporations. (Especially those that exist only as legal entities.) I know of one nearby me that’s basically just a mailbox, even though it’s listed as the address for many, many corporations.

The whole purpose of a corporate entity, as a legal concept, is to shield the directors, and officers, from personal liability. Unless personally named in a suit, a CEO almost never shows up in court. That’s a job for an attorney.

The railroad workers’ strike really gave the game away as to whom the Democrats actually represent: Biden made some reasonable points about how a transportation shutdown would affect the economy and national security, which would’ve provided ample justification to nationalize the rails and use access to them as leverage. (With the side benefit of fixing most of Amtrak’s problems.) But there was no talk of the railroad companies feeling any of the pain. Protecting the economy was a burden that the workers had to shoulder alone.

Oh! Oh! Another good one to know is the Fundamental Attribution Error. That’s the double standard whereby people explain their own behavior in terms of extrinsic influences and pressures on themselves, so that even if they do bad things, it’s not their own fault. They had little choice, you see. But, in contrast, we can’t see the extrinsic influences and pressures on other people, so we explain their bad behavior as the result of intrinsic factors, i.e. they’re bad people.

The driving one is called the Lake Wobegon Effect. When everybody rates themselves as above-average at something, like driving, that’s definitionally impossible. The name comes from the segment, the News from Lake Wobegon, on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion, which Garrison Keillor would always sign off, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

But yes, it’s so common that the phenomenon has a name.

On the contrary, everybody hates cars. I’ve never met a driver who doesn’t hate cars. Fuckcars is just the concentrated form.

That’s bad that the car’s software confused a closed garage door for a kid.

Our city buses do it as a routine part of many routes, as do school buses. Large trucks and construction vehicles, too. Me, when I’m towing my boat sometimes. Intersections inherently force vehicles into crossing paths. That’s what an intersection is. So, if it’s dangerous, then we shouldn’t have intersections.

Call out the real problem here: shitty, entitled drivers.

Hey, I think I cracked it, folks!

Central to all of this, unsurprisingly, are councils’ shrivelled post-austerity budgets, and the ever-increasing challenge of keeping road networks up to scratch when their other statutory obligations such as special needs.

Turns out, roads are really bloody expensive.

Gosh, so owned. So very, very owned. By such an intelligent and aesthetically pleasing being. What an honor!

Ah, so we judge actions not by their merit, but by who performs them? Or, put another way, if you wrestle a pig, you both get muddy.

I’ve heard variations on this basic story in men’s spaces online so, so many times. He made the classic mistake of opening up about his fears and vulnerabilities.

What’s hilarious is that I knew that this kind of reply would be forthcoming. Thanks for not disappointing!

You know nothing about me, and very little of what I think, yet you conceptualized my motivations as attacking my enemies, and now you’re telling me what I think.

I just suggested some introspection.

Look at the other replies I’ve received, and think about how people outside of your online community might feel being on the receiving end.

Yes, the reflexive “allies and enemies” framing of the situation does reinforce the image of a harassment campaign.

Oh lordy, ever have one of those moments when you know you’re about to do something dumb, but do it anyway? Well, I would ask that you folks stop for a moment, and observe this situation from an outsider’s perspective. From where I sit, this very thread right here looks like a harassment campaign.

Without doubt, the turkey. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride: The North American bird is named after the Eurasian country because it reminded settlers from Europe of an African bird, the guinea fowl. Allegedly, they called the guinea fowl “turkey fowl” because it was first imported to Europe through Turkey.

That’d be crazy enough, if it stopped there. The French call it dinde, as in d’Inde, or Indian fowl, because it came from a land originally confused with India. The Dutch, though, call it kalkoen, which derives from “fowl of Calicut,” which is a city in India now called Kozhikode. Lots of other languages use a derivation of this word. Apparently, they got turkeys from India after Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. I say Americas, because the Portuguese name is perú, a South American name that they used to refer to Spanish settlements in the Americas, generally. The Spanish, on the other hand, call the bird pavo, derived from the Latin word for peafowl, which actually are from India.

Germans, at least, call it Truthuhn, or Pute, onomatopoetic names based on the birds’ calls.

As the other commenter shared, in Germany they’re working on an interchangeable battery system. In the U.S., the manufacturers sell intro bundles cheaply to get us locked into their “ecosystem.” That’s the scam part. I’ve got a drill and impact driver set that i paid less for than the replacement cost of the included batteries. It’s the same scheme as inkjet printers.

Cordless power tools. Yes, they are useful in concept, but today they’re just a loss-leader to sell you overpriced batteries.